I had a conversation with an interesting individual today.  It was a fascinating conversation–different from so many that I have with sales people.  I was interviewing a candidate for a client.  On paper, the person didn’t seem to be a natural fit, but I was taken by this individual—at least his mentality and attitude.

Too many people I speak with have a sense of entitlement-that they are owed something.  Whether deserved or not, there is an arrogance about their jobs and (always) compensation.  They often refuse to recognize the need to change–even if they see things aren’t working they continue to do the same thing.  Or they feel they are owed a job, it’s benefits, and compensation because they are putting in the effort.

This gentleman was completely different.  He told me his story–started as a technical support person in technology companies.  Several years ago, was laid off.  He shared his struggles in finding someone that would hire him.  He said that he decided to take a different approach, if he couldn’t find someone to hire him for “40 hours a week,” he would find “40 people who would hire him for an hour a week.”

In looking for a job, he came across an advertisement for a sales job.  I won’t go into the details of the job, but in interviewing, he was told he couldn’t do it, that he didn’t have any sales experience.  He convinced the company to give him a chance–he said he was willing to work for 100% commission.  To make a long story short, he struggled building his business.  It took time, he didn’t have a whole lot of support from the company, but they let him act as an independent agent.  Over a couple of years he built a business from absolutely nothing.  He got the most difficult territory.  Because he was an independent agent, he didn’t get a lot of support — so he had to figure things out for himself, create a lot of his own demand generation programs, and drive the business.

In a couple of years, he had built a pretty nice little business.  His results weren’t stunning, but they were good.  He was making a living, paying for his family.  He was looking to the future.  He was investing in himself and his business—hiring some subcontractors to do work that wasn’t a good use of his time.

I talked to him about the job he was interviewing for.  I said, “On paper, you don’t look like a great fit.  You don’t have any experience in the industry and these types of solutions……”  His response was simple, “I’ll figure it out.”  He went on to explain exactly what he would do–he had researched the company, the industry, and had some ideas.  Some of them weren’t right, but his thinking and approach were sound.  He went on to say, “I’ll do it for 100% commission.”  Our conversation went on for a few more minutes. There was no boasting, just a straightforward approach on what it would take, what he would do, and appropriate examples of how he had done similar things in the past.

He was probably the least “qualified” candidate, but he stood out.  Others came from more traditional backgrounds.  They were concerned about their territories, quotas, commission plans.  They were worried about the marketing programs and would they be getting leads.  They had lists of concerns and reservations.  Most had good track records–not outstanding, but satisfactory track records.  They asked the usual questions, and, in the end, none of them struck me as much as this one gentleman.

He didn’t know all the questions to ask.  He didn’t know what other candidates knew, he didn’t have any experience in the industry, he knew he wasn’t a fit.  But he stood out.  He didn’t hide these, he didn’t try to pump up his experience, he didn’t have any unrealistic expectations.  He just had a commitment to do whatever it took to be successful and to figure it out.  His past experience indicated it wasn’t a hollow claim.

Somehow I knew he could figure it out.  Success in the job actually required that.  Somehow, as much experience as the others brought, I wasn’t comfortable they would figure it out.  They needed to much, they had too many concerns—about themselves and their needs.  They were too concerned about the risks and focused on the possibilities and figuring out how to get there.

I don’t know if he’s the right guy, whether there will be an ultimate fit.  There are assessments and other things to go through.  But attitudinally and based on what he had done, he was head an shoulders above everyone else.  There’s something about these people that you have to really respect.  Their willingness to do what it takes, the absence of pre-conditions, the willingness to take risk, the total absence of a feeling they are “owed something.”

Related posts:

1. Lost Opportunity — It Takes Courage To Say You’ve Made A Mistake

One of the things I love the most about sales people is the eternal optimism.  It really takes a tremendously positive outlook to be a great sales person.  After all, we face rejection every day.  We face challenges and obstacles in every situation.  Some are challenges come from changing customer expectations. We always face market and competitive challenges.  Sometimes we face challenges from within our own companies.

It requires tremendous resilience and optimism to succeed in selling.

But sometimes that optimism hurts us.  Sometimes it prevents us from looking at reality, from seeing things the way they really are, not how we want them to be.  This is, perhaps, the most dangerous challenge sales people face.  It’s one of our own creation.  And it’s funny, it sneaks up on us–it never smacks us in the face, it kind of creeps in.  All of a sudden we find ourselves mired in a very difficult situation, struggling to understand and work our ways out.

It happens all sorts of ways.  Our pipelines aren’t as full as we want.  Our managers may be pressuring us to increase the numbers of deals in the pipeline.  We relax our qualification criteria to get more deals—but because they aren’t in our sweet spot, our ability to win is threatened.  All of a sudden our win rates go down.  This makes our pipelines look worse, we relax our qualification criteria further…. you know how this story ends.

Or it’s the deal we just can’t let go.  We’ve invested a lot of time and resource.  We believe if we just do a few more things, we can persevere.  We do those, it’s not sufficient, we do a few more…… it goes on forever.  The deal’s dead, but we can’t let it go.

Or we are busy, our days our filled with meeting after meeting, call after call.  But we aren’t making progress.  We confuse busyness with progress and accomplishment.

Facing reality is critical to our success.  If our pipelines aren’t full, we mask the real problem by filling them with junk.  If a deal just won’t move forward, continuing with wishful thinking doesn’t change things–it keeps us from really understanding what it takes to win–or even if it is winnable  And busyness masks everything.  We don’t have the time to reflect, to understand if we are making progress or just filling our time.

Facing reality is tough.  We may discover things we don’t want to confront.  We may not be as strong as we had hoped we were.  We may discover we need new skills to improve our ability to compete.  It may tell us we’re spending our time with the wrong customers–that we may have to find new customers.

Facing reality is important.  Good or bad, it provides the ability to understand the issues most impacting our performance.  It helps us identify and solve our problems.  It allows us to improve or fix things that keep us from achieving our goals.

It’s easy and tempting to fool ourselves, to the point of hiding our heads in the sand.  But that doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it worse.

If you aren’t achieving your goals, are you really looking at what’s happening.  Are you seeing things the way they are or the way you want them to be?  Facing reality is the only path to performance improvement.

Related posts:

1. What Are The Biggest Challenges Facing Sales VP’s In This Economy
2. No Grin-F#!?ing Allowed!
3. Are Your People Selling What They’re Supposed To Sell?

I’ve got a terrible confession to make.  I cheat.  I don’t want to play fair and square.  I don’t like to play on a level playing field.  I do everything I can to tilt deals to my favor.  I do everything I can to stack the deck.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Our inclination as sales people is to do this.  We want our customers to prioritize the things that we do well and that our competitors do poorly.  Likewise, we want our customer to de-prioritize the things our competitors do well and we do poorly.  We do everything we can to shift the criteria and customer’s attitudes in our favor.

Unfortunately, in the new world of buying, it’s becoming more and more difficult to stack the deck.  Customers are determining their needs, requirements and priorities without us.  By the time they’ve developed a short list, their requirements are already locked in concrete.  The vendors on the shortlist—our competitors and us, are there because we all meet their minimum needs.  The customers have leveled the playing field for those they have invited to play.  Now we’re in an elimination match.

If we want to stack the deck, we have to change our approach.  We can’t wait for the customer to have a need, we have to be premptive.  We have to get in early–before the customer has a need, before they recognize they have a problem.  To stack the deck, we need to get them excited about a new opportunity for their company–a way to grow, a way to improve.  We want to create a sense of urgency around what that will do for them, and how we can help them do this.

If we want to stack the deck, we have to invest in them.  We have to earn the right to have them listen to our ideas about changing their business.  We have to have credibility and their trust. 

We have to create value–both in the ideas and interactions, and in the solutions we offer.  If we don’t we’re helping our competitors stack the deck for themselves.  We have to offer more than a product pitch, we have to do more than answer their questions, handle their objections and ask for the order.  Everyone else is doing that, we have to be different.

Some might say, “Dave that’s unrealistic, while we try to do that, the customer wants to create a level playing field.”  I’m not sure I agree.  I’m not sure that customers want to create a level playing field.  I think customers want to stack the decks in their favor—in favor of helping them achieve their goals, and produce results.  If we do our job right–we can align ourselves with the customer, stacking the deck to allow each of us achieve our objectives.

What are you doing to stack the deck?

Related posts:

1. Buying Has Nothing To Do With The Product We Sell!
2. Performance Management Friday — Win/Loss Analysis

I read a fascinating Op Ed piece by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, Average Is Over.  It’s a fascinating piece.  As I reflected on the piece it struck me how important this concept is to professional selling.

Friedman makes the point, “”…everyone needs to find their extra–their unique value contribution that makes them stand out…”   Friedman is not writing about organizations, he’s writing about individuals, each  of us.   It’s a profound concept, understanding it is like discovering the secret decoder ring for sales success.

In a buyer’s world, where too many products are undifferentiated, where the differences between the companies that stand behind the products are relatively small, where quality is similar, where everything balances out–and on average they are the same, there are two things that stand out as real differentiators:  price and what each of us contributes as sales professionals.  And in competitive situations, where pricing is roughly the same, the difference between winning and losing is each of us.

It’s no longer sufficient to be “average.”  Each of us has to find a way to stand out and differentiate what we do.  It might be our knowledge of what the customer is trying to do, it might be the confidence we instill about the new solution, it might  be the trust we have earned in working with them.

Just good enough is no longer a winning strategy (a number of years ago, I worked with an industry leading company that had that as their strategy–and they were remarkably successful.  We have to set ourselves apart, we have to create the value and differentiate ourselves.  As Friedman points out, it is ultimately what each of us contributes that makes a real difference.

It’s a tremendously powerful concept for sales people, partly because it’s a simple concept, partly because it puts success or failure squarely in our hands.  We can control and manage the difference we make with our customers.  We can control and manage the value we create to set ourselves apart.  Competing and winning becomes much more clear–we are in control because it is the differentiation that each of us create that separate us from the average.  It can actually be quite easy–particularly if everyone else is striving to be average.  In essence, we become the value proposition–or we can be one of the crowd, average.

Sales people–and the people they engage in working with a customer are the ultimate differentiators.  How we and our team work with the customer is what separates us from the rest–the average.

Do you know what separates you and distinguishes you from everyone else?  Are you demonstrating that in every interaction with your customers?

Do you know what distinctive value you create–for your customers, for the people you work with?  Do they understand that value?

Are you constantly looking to  set yourself apart?

Average is over.  Average is not a winning sales strategy.

No related posts.

Sales people are notoriously bad at writing things down and documenting things.  I talk to thousands a year.  When I start talking about documenting something–a deal plan, an account plan, territory, call plans, even a to-do list–all of a sudden you can see the resistance in their faces. 

They sit back, fold their arms.  Most say nothing, but a few courageous one’s will say, “Dave, you don’t get it.  I’m  too busy to do this.  I don’t have time to document these things–it’s too bureaucratic–I’ve got a plan, it’s in my head!”

I’m used to this.  I respond, “OK, I get it, let’s talk about your plan for this opportunity………”  It’s always the same, they start talking, they tell me about the deal, they tell me about what they’ve done.  I start asking questions, “Where are you in the sales process, how do you know you are aligned with the customer buying process, what are the risks to the customers in this project, what is your positioning vis a vis the competitors, ….. the list goes on.”  I get more data, but as we proceed, it gets sketchier and sketchier. 

We then talk about “What are the next things you need to do, who do you need to do it with, when are you going to do it?  What’s the positioning you need to win this deal?”   They respond, they outline action plans and strategies, I take notes, writing down the next steps.  Ususally they don’t.  They say, they’re under control, they can do the deal, they don’t need to document the plan.  I smile and thank them.

At the first milestone, I call or email, “How did it go?”  You know what happens–the majority of the time, the response comes back, “I forgot to do it, I’ll get right on it.”  The second milestone, “How did it go?”  You know…..

We sit down, I pull out my notes from the last meeting and ask “We developed these strategies to position ourselves to win.  We committed to these steps and actions to execute the strategies.  Where are we in executing the plan?”  The discussion usually involves a lot of hand waving, some apologies, a re-commitment to execute the strategy, then a quick escape.  This time they write a few things down, but too often, they’re forgotten.

Sales people are right, they are busy, they’ve got a lot of things to do, different deals, different accounts, different sales callse.  Changing customer requirements, shifts in our strategies.  It’s impossible to keep it in your head.  You lose most of it–you may remember one or two things, you may have jotted down a couple of reminders, but most of the time we’re busy with activities, responding customer requests, reacting to what may have happened in the last call.  We drift further and further away from our plans and strategies.  Sales cycles get lengthened, deals go away.

It is impossible to keep it all in our heads!  We need to document our plans, we need to use the plans to guide our actions, keeping us focused, on target, moving forward purposefully in the execution of our strategies.  We need to document our plans–they provide the basis for what we do every day.  They provide the foundation of taking our daily activities and transforming them into accomplishments.

Being too busy to  document your plans–whether it’s a deal plan, prospecting, call, territory, account or other plan–is just an excuse.  It’s an excuse for being less productive, it’s an excuse for winning less, it’s an excuse for not being accountable.

Writing it down, keeps us focused, having it documented, means we don’t have to remember and we never forget.  Many of us work with teams–a documented plan keeps the team focused, well coordinated and moving forward.

• Do you take the time to maximize your productivity, impact and effectiveness?
• Are you documenting and updating all your deal/opportunity plans?
• Are you documenting and updating your prospecting plans?
• Are you documenting and updating your account and territory plans?
• Are you prioritizing all of these in your day to day activities?

Related posts:

1. Not Worth The “Paper It’s Written” On
2. Reacting!
3. Performance Management Friday — Wallet Share

As I mentioned in the previous, What If We’re Not Important post, it’s always difficult to imagine what we sell and do may not be important.

Don’t get me wrong, what we do is important to someone–after all if we were truly not important, then our companies would be out of business.  The issue is are we important enough for the customers to invest in now?  We may have great business cases, but regardless how compelling the business case, if we aren’t at the top of the hit parade of our customers’ strategic initiatives, we won’t get the order.

In the last post, I suggested we address this by trying to align ourselves with one of the top 2-3 strategic initiatives.  If we can do this and become part of something important to the customer, that’s ideal.  However, try as we might, sometimes we just can’t do this.  How do we move forward?  How do we continue to sell and grow?

While it may seem an unusual strategy, perhaps we can win by making ourselves “unimportant.”  Yes, I know, it sounds weird, if they won’t buy because we’re not important, how are we ever going to convince them to buy if we demonstrate that we’re unimportant?

Here’s the thought.  There are lots of things that have to get done within organizations to make them work.  They may not be important or strategic initiatives, but they have to get done because they can impact the ability to execute strategic initiatives.  Executives can’t ignore these things—but they shouldn’t be spending their time on these things—and that’s the “in” we have to exploit.

With due respect to some of my followers who provide Janitorial services or Waste Management services (actually every sales person can learn a lot from these businesses), clean offices and empty trash cans shouldn’t be on our customers’ minds.  Clean offices and empty trash cans are unlikely to ever be part of a strategic initiative in a company.

At the same time, it’s important to have clean offices and empty trash cans.  Without these, it could impact the ability of people to execute their strategic initiatives.  (Remember for the lack of a horseshoe, a kingdom was lost.).

I’m doing the people who sell these services a disservice–their strategies in dealing with this reality are quite sophisticated and successful.  Mostly because they don’t let their egos get involved in their self importance.

But for many of us, it’s difficult to put our solutions in the same category–even though our customers already have done that.

The opportunity here is to make it so unimportant to the management team that they just don’t have to worry about it or deal with it.  They should be focusing on the execution of their strategic initiatives–not worrying about if the offices are clean and the trash has been dealt with.  A very powerful sales strategy is to take the problem off our customers’ already overloaded plates.  “You shouldn’t have to worry about this or deal with it, let us take it off your hands so you never have to be concerned.”

Our customers want to and should be focusing only on their strategic initiatives.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of other things that may consume their time–making sure the offices are running smoothly, the cash is collected, the machines are operating, the computers are working, we can make copies of documents, payroll goes out, and the list goes on and on and on.  If our products and services fit in those categories, our value is “the customer just doesn’t have to worry about it, they don’t have to spend a nanosecond thinking about it, they can spend all their time dealing with the important issues.”

Once we start thinking about things this way, it opens new ways of thinking about our products and services.  Some impact our sales strategies, some impact our overall business and solutions strategies.  We see so many companies defining what they do based on being “unimportant” to the customer.  While the folks at Xerox may quibble with me, document production, copying is really not mission critical for most of us.  Xerox and it’s competitors used to sell copiers–but the company still had to worry about it, they had to make sure to order paper and toner.  They had to have people capable of dealing with simple problems like jams.  It’s not really on the critical path to anything at a company, but it’s something that has to get done.  So Xerox and it’s competitors are adopting new strategies–they’re not just selling copiers, they are selling managed print services.  They are saying, don’t worry about it, don’t invest any time in thinking about it, don’t train your people on how to fix jams, we’ll manage all of that for you.

Being “unimportant” to our customers opens a whole new range of opportunities for us, new problems to take off our customers’ hands, new things they don’t have to or want to worry about.  We can redefine our offerings and services to exploit this–in fact creating powerful relationships and solving important problems — giving management more time to focus on what’s really important.  (Isn’t it funny how this works?)

So maybe we should stop pushing ropes uphill.  If we can’t be strategically important to our customers, if we can’t be on their critical growth path, perhaps we should focus on being unimportant to our customers.  There are more opportunities than we realize to make money by being unimportant.

(By the way, if you are struggling with these issues, call us up. We’ve been working with lot of organizations on strategies to overcome this. We’d be glad to explore these with you.)

Related posts:

1. What If We’re Not Important?
2. Buying Isn’t Important, It’s The Results Of Buying That Are Important!
3. How Important Are “Techniques” To Sales?

Last week, I talked about the importance of Win Loss Analysis.   No one questions doing win/loss analysis, in particular, we really worry about losses.  There is a hidden performance and resource drain that can have a dramatic impact on our success.  It’s the abandoned deal. 

Abandoned deals happen more frequently then we think–we usually don’t track them well.  But they’re the deals that we’ve qualified and pursue proactively.  We may abandon them for many reasons–we lose interest, our customers lose interest in us, we see that we can’t win, or any other reasons.  Increasingly, however, I’m seeing the most damaging type of abandoned deals, “No Decision Made.”  These are tragic–we invest in the entire sales cycles.  We spend our time, we invest resources from our company, we go right to the end and nothing happens.

We don’t win, we don’t get the order–but no one does, so no one loses.  The customer just doesn’t make a decision. 

There’s another way this happens.  We go through the sales cycle and the customer–the functional managers get excited.  They select us, then they go to executive management for funding–and the executives choose to invest in a completely unrelated project–something that has nothing to do with the functional group we have been working with.  It’s not a competitive loss–it’s just that our project is a lower priority than others they are considering.

I’m seeing an increasing numer of abandoned deals, typically, we don’t pay much attention to them.  We analyze our Wins and Losses, but abandoned deals fall off our radar screens.  But these deals can be very significant.  In the past month, I’ve been invovled analyzing several companies—some capital/equipment companies, a major systems integrator, a few software companies and a few services companies.  The lowest rate of abandoned deals was 22%.  Most were significantly higher.

Think of that, think of the impact of these levels of abandoned deals–a minimum of 22% of your pipeline has disappeared!  Think of the time you’ve invested, think of the emotional investment that you have in the deal.  Think if the resources you have invested and the expectations you have raised in your company.

But usually we don’t pay attention to this–we track wins and losses.  We just kind of forget about abandoned deals.

What do we do to reduce abandoned deals–I’ll spend more time on this issue in some future blog posts, however, by belief this is largely a qualification problem.  We push a customer to look at something, but it doesn’t have a high sense of urgency.  At the end of the cycle, they just shrug and decide to do nothing.  We avoid this by really looking at the urgency, the consequences of not solving the problem very early in the sales cycle.  We check to see if the project is high on the priorities of the executive teams–the people controlling the purse strings.

Don’t just look at wins and losses.  Remember abandoned deals are important to track.  Understanding those abandoned deals, avoiding them at qualification is important to producing results and managing your time.

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — Funnel Churn
2. Performance Management Friday — % Of Opportunities Advanced
3. Performance Management Friday — Win/Loss Analysis

Over the past few months, I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions on sales compensation.  Last quarter, the conversations focused on commission and bonus plans people were looking to put in place for this year.  Last week and this week, I’m involved in a lot of discussions about people being disappointed in the bonuses they received or didn’t receive for last year, how to manage the issues and so forth.

We talk about pay for performance all the time.  Everyone likes pay for performance when there are great years.  When we’ve blown out the numbers or overachieved our goals, people are excited about pay for performance.  But when we have had a tough year.  When business is down or we haven’t met our goals—despite how hard we worked and how much we tried—we don’t like pay for performance.  I can’t count the discussions I’ve had about, “my people think they should be paid for their hard work and effort.”

I have to admit I’m a little hard nosed about this topic.  We can’t have it both ways, it’s just an insane argument.  When we perform well we should be compensated for it.  When we perform poorly, we should be compensated for that performance—not our effort.  If our performance has been down from the previous year, our compensation should be less than the previous year.  We’ve produced fewer results.

I suppose it’s human nature to focus on ourselves and our compensation.  It’s natural to always want to see progression and increases.  But failing to produce results impacts more than our compensation.  It ripples through the entire company, it impacts shareholder perception, suppliers and others. 

If the sales organization as a whole doesn’t produce results, people lose jobs.  Even though we have worked very hard, even though we have put in long hours, we haven’t produced the results.  We can’t pay the bills in the organization, we can fund new projects and programs through good intentions and hard work.

Accountability is tough.  There are upsides and downsides.  We can’t choose to be happy with the upside only and not have to bear the consequences of the downside.  Accountability is blind to that.

I’m tough on this.  People say, they should be better compensated.  My answer is very simple, you can be better compensated.  It is totally in your control.  Meet or overachieve your goals.  Your compensation will increase when that happens.

Perhaps my view was shaped many years ago when I was having a similar discussion about my compensation with my manager at the time.  I thought I deserved an increase because of my dedication and efforts.  His response was succinct and clear:  “Your increase will become effective when you become effective.”

Are you being effective?  Are you achieving your goals and producing results?  If you aren’t you have no basis for any discussion on your compensation.  Sales is a job in which we are compensated for our performance, so it’s our responsibility to perform.

Related posts:

1. Performance Management And Accountability
2. Compensation Drives Sales Behavior? Is Compensation The Only Tool For Managing Sales Performance?
3. Pay For Performance?

Take a look at the two pictures below (courtesy of RapidRepair.com).  In one sense they are exactly the same.  Both are pictures of the Apple iPhone 4s.  One shows the iPhone as a set of parts and pieces.  The other shows an assembled iPhone 4S.

You know the next question, “What’t the difference between those pictures?”  The obvious answer is that only one works. It’s the assembled iPhone.

A lot of organizations are similar.  When I talk to them, they have all the pieces/parts.  They have a sales process, they have hired the right people, they have a good organizational structure, they have a compensation plan, they have training, they have demand generation programs, they have marketing and nurturing programs, they have CRM and other Sales 2.0 tools.  They have everything—all the pieces parts, but somehow things aren’t working. 

Having all the pieces/parts does not give you a working system or a high performing organization.  The missing element is those pieces parts aren’t assembled and working together.  See each part is dependent on the other parts to perform its function.  If they aren’t assembled and working together, the organizational goals can never be achieved.

The problem gets worse, in many organizations there are parts that are missing.  Or there may be incompatible or the wrong parts.  You can’t even put these together, the organization can never achieve it’s goals.

To many organization are not achieving their goals because of these issues.  The most difficult organizations are those that think they have all the pieces/parts, and keep focusing on these pieces, rather than looking at how they fit together and work as a whole.  I see sales organizations with a sales process—but it’s not used.  Managers don’t use it in doing opportunity and pipeline reviews, sales people don’t use it to help improve their effectiveness, it’s not integrated into the CRM system or other tools.

Organizations implement sales training, but it’s not integrated with the other pieces parts.  Marketing works on demand generation, developing content, nurturing customers, but aren’t producing sales qualified leads.  Customer service isn’t aligned with the commitments sales has made to the customers or the overall customer experience strategies.

Smart executives come to me, saying “We’ve done everything, we have all the different components, why aren’t things working?”  The answer becomes obvious when you think of it just like the two pictures of the iPhone above.  The parts don’t produce results on their own, they have to be assembled and working as a system to produce results.

We break up what we do into components and parts.  It’s the only way we can manage complexity and solve problems.  We have to design each part to perform it’s function ideally.  But we have to go further, we have to make sure each part complements and works optimally with the others, then we have to put all the parts together and make them work as a whole.

We have to manage all of these over time–if a part fails or breaks, we have to replace it.  If our sales process is failing, we have to fix it, because without it, the other elements won’t work effectively and we will fail to achieve our goals.  If we’ve hired the wrong people, we have to correct that for the same reasons.

The pieces/important.  If we are missing some, things don’t work (or don’t work well).  If we have the wrong ones, things don’t work.  We have to have all the right pieces.  But we can’t stop there, we have to assemble them and have them working efficiently together.  We also have to be using them.  Having a sales process and not using it is just as bad as not having one.  Likewise, not using your CRM system is the equivalent of not having one–actually worse, you’ve paid a lot of money for it.

• Do you have all the pieces?
• Do you have the right pieces?
• Have you put them together so they work together efficiently and effectively?

All three are critical to maximizing performance.  Without them, it’s virtually impossible to achieve our goals.

(Thanks to RapidRepair.com for letting me use these pictures)

Related posts:

1. How Do All The Pieces Fit Together?
2. No Sales Model Is Forever, What To Do When What Worked Isn’t Working
3. Do You Really Want To Sell?

Win/Loss Analysis is critical in helping us improve our results.  But there are a couple of perspectives in win/loss analysis I think are important in driving performance improvement and improving our ability to win — hopefully ultimately just doing win reviews

There are two different perspectives of wins and losses that I’d like to discuss.  One is the fairly typical win/loss review that should be conducted with every major opportunity–particularly for every major loss.  The other is a broader view of wins and losses–looking at overall trends and patterns across the broad number of opportunities.

Win/Loss Deal Reviews:

After each major win and especially after losses, we want to take some time to analyze the opportunity to understand why we won or lost.  We want to review our strategies, and how we executed the sales process:  What did we do well?  Where were we off target?  What do we need to change?  We want to consider:

• Was this the right opportunity for us to compete in?  Was in in our sweet spot?
• Were we working with the right people in the customer?  Were we covering everyone appropriately, did we understand their decision making process?
• Did we understand what they were trying to achieve?  Did we understand their goals?  Did we understand the business impacts of the problems they were trying to address?
• Was our solution responsive to their needs?  Did the customer tell us that?  Did the customer believe we really could solve their problem?  Where did the customer feel we were superior?  Where did the customer feel we were inferior or deficient?
• Did we understand the alternatives the customer was considering?  Did we reposition ourselves effectively?  Did the competition do a better job?
• Did we have a differentiated and superior value proposition that was meaningful to the customer and that they bought?  Were we deficient in any areas?  Were we differentiated from the customer’s point of view?
• Did we have a justified solution that met or exceeded all the customer objectives, and did we demonstrate the business case to the customer’s satisfaction?
• What would we have changed about our approach?  What might we have done better?

Ideally, particuarly for losses, we will interview the customer to understand the decision they made, and what we might have done differently.

These reviews are great learning vehicles–for sales people individually and for our organization.  We learn how we can continue to improve–both in how we sell, but our products and services.

 Win/Loss Trends:

This is a broader review of wins and losses.  It doesn’t focus on specific deals but looks to identify systemic performance issues.  It allows us to look at organizational issues and trends, rather than the specifics of a deal.  It enables us to better assess our overall effectiveness.  I like to look at wins and losses over a number of years to see if there are any trends that we can learn from.  For example:

• What’s our win rate overall?  Is it consistent, is it improving?
• What’s our average transaction value–both for all the deals we compete in, but also for the deals we win?  Can we see trends, is there a difference between the average value for the deals we win and the deals we compete for?  Are we good at winning the small deals but we can’t win the big deals?  A similar analysis around sales cycle time is good.
• Do we tend to win more with certain types of customers or certain types of solutions or products?
• Do certain teams seem to win more than others?
• What’s the volume of deals that we compete for look like? Is it appropriate to support our goals, do we see any trends?
• Are there certain competitors that we have greater difficulty in competing with?
• Do we see trends in the reasons for winning or losing?
• Do we have difficulties in certain parts of the sales process?
• Are there certain things we do in the sales process that cause us to win more often?  Are there things we are skipping that cause us to lose more often?

Understanding and Improving:

Win/Loss review have to focus on learning and improvement.  We can gain a lot–as individual, teams, and organizations to learn where we do well, where we do poorly, and how we can improve.  Understanding at both a micro–deal by deal, and macro level—overall patterns and trends, can give us great insight and improve our ability to compete.

Too many organizations conduct win loss reviews for the wrong reason—to assign blame.  We learn nothing from this.  We lose the chance to improve.  Focusing on blame is a waste of time and resource.

Are you looking at your wins and losses from both a micro and macro point of view?

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures
2. Performance Management Friday — Funnel Balance
3. Performance Management Friday — Wallet Share